Encore

After more than five years spent battling media hypocrisy (and most of his family), hip-hop's most notorious white rapper returns with his first full-length since his well-received performance and Oscar-winning musical contribution to 8 Mile.

In 2000, Eminem was frequently vilified as a hatemonger, homophobe, and misogynist; in 2002, he was on the shortlist for Time magazine's "Man of the Year." America loves a tale of redemption almost as much as one of comeuppance, but at the start of the decade you'd have gotten pretty long odds on the media and cultural elite spinning the Marshall Mathers yarn as the former before the latter. And yet, somewhere between hugging Elton onstage at the Grammys and sending that guy in the Pistons jersey to pick up his Oscar, Em was feted by many of America's best-known cultural crits, columnist, and pundits: Frank Rich, Andrew Sarris, Maureen Dowd, Greil Marcus, Neal Gabler, and Paul Slansky (among others) either laid garlands at his feet or rhapsodized about the supposed transformation of the rapper/actor.

The epistolary weepie "Stan" and the survivalist self-helpisms of "Lose Yourself" played a part in the slow mainstream media embrace of Eminem, but it's that "slash" that seemed to complete the embrace. For whatever reason, a film career can do that-- maybe it's the ability for a lengthy narrative to be more explicitly mutli-dimensional or maybe it's just lazy thinking and knee-jerk reactionary assumptions about pop, but you're now as likely to see Em torn down on Vibe than The New York Times Magazine.

Well, Maureen, Andrew, and Greil, get ready to be excited; most of the rest of you-- the ones who've been held enthrall by Em's complex games of shifting his identity, challenging hypocrisy, baiting liberal guilt, and spitting deft rhymes with his labyrinthine flow-- prepare for disappointment: Encore is a fourth fascinating record from Eminem, but it's also easily his weakest and, in many ways, tamest album to date.

Eminem's reaction to respectability seems to have been to move in two different directions: introspection and reconciliation on the one side, and bodily fluid-obsessed humor on the other. Tracks in which Em offers confessions, explanations, and apologies for previous comments and his participation in high-profile beefs share time here with belching, farting, vomiting, and urinating. He's also scrubbed his lyrics of homophobia (instead, the fascinating and eyebrow-raising homoeroticism hinted at on The Eminem Show-- and literally fleshed out in his music video cross-dressing-- colors a handful of his songs here) and, save a few blasts at Kim, any elements of misogyny.

Therefore, if Encore is anything, it's a transitional record. After an image-confounding trio of pseudo self-titled records, the Eminem of Encore is wounded and weary; he's removing the layers of meta, still laughing and nodding but rarely winking, and not disappearing behind what The Village Voice's Frank Kogan once labeled Em's lyrical "trapdoors and escape hatches." Instead, the LP is the sound of a man who seems bored of re-branding and playing celebrity games, and often seems to be rapping only to entertain himself with little regard for any potential audience. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Despite the album's pronounced maturity/infantilism divide, it's a different dichotomy that characterizes the album's highlights: Here, Em is at his best when he's either more focused than even before or at his most scattered and playful. Unfortunately, most of the tracks that don't veer toward either extreme are plodding and unremarkable.

Much of the first third of the record features Eminem unloading his emotional weight. Childhood tale "Yellow Brick Road" is the closest thing to biographical narrative he's ever done, and his remorseful explanation of the situation around which he, as a hurt kid, lashed out in a few racially-tinged rhymes at a black girl is not only compelling but effectively diffuses Source editor Benzino's long-running attack campaign on the rapper. It's also Em's best exploration of living his life in the rare space between America's too-wide racial divide. Fittingly, it leads into "Like Toy Soldiers", a public hand-wringing over the feuds that Em and 50 Cent have been drawn into, the consequences of these battles, and-- most importantly-- the toll they've taken, both physically and emotionally. The martial beat is a bit heavy-handed, but it's counterbalanced by the pleasantly surprising chorus' sample of Martika's "Toy Soldiers", perhaps a nod to either Kanye's helium-vocaled samples or the 00s trend toward trance-pop covers of 80s hits.

Em also shines when he spins well off his axis, as he does on both the hilarious "Rain Man" and the R. Kelly/Triumph the Insult Comic Dog-baiting "Ass Like That", songs that both tell a lot of the same sort of celebrity- or redneck-oriented jokes as previous Em tracks, but have new punchlines and almost completely skip the need for structure. The songs sound more like mixtape or freestyle material than album tracks, and they're better off for it.

Outside of those tracks and a few lively guest spots from the usual suspects (50 Cent, Nate, Dre, Obie-- hey, where's Proof?), things get sketchy. "Mosh"-- sadly, not yet completely past its sell-by date-- seems more like a plodding dirge here among the spry string of tracks that surround it. "Just Lose It" is still most notable for dancing with paedo and homoerotic imagery: It's the one track here that seems as potentially multilayered as the best of The Marhsall Mathers LP, yet it's still more curio than anything else. On one of the two Kim tracks, Em confuses domestic violence with commitment, an awkward flirtation with the idea that you only hurt the ones you love. Elsewhere, with their relationship now more deteriorated than ever, poor Kim only rates a "you make me puke" where she once was murder ballad "worthy."

Sonically, the record is more of the same: simple minor-chord piano lines, Dre's elastic funk, Em's clicky and too-often weak drums. A "Crazy on You" sample is wasted on a weak track ("Crazy in Love") and the belching chorus of "My 1st Single" threatens to pulls the rug out from under an otherwise durable song. The advantage of Em going back to same musical well is that he's become so adept at riding these types of beats that his delivery and tangible personality are compelling almost no matter what the content of his rhymes; he even mixes things up with drastic shifts in cadence-- sometimes within the same track-- and occasional impersonations.

In the promotional run-up to Encore's release, Eminem has been dressed in his courtroom best, suits and wire-rims-- again, great for the Manhattan media, but another MOR flag. At 30-plus, he's also worried about his legacy, trying to mobilize his version of a live-free-or-die army, and the record even drops very vague yet odd hints at retirement. Em has specifically said that the curtain isn't coming down, but the almost afterthought with which the record is framed (packaged and titled more like an addendum to The Eminem Show rather than a follow up with a two-year gap), its jaw-droppingly weak single, and the smoke-and-mirrors of coasting on talent and skill indicates that he either needs a breather or a new well of inspiration.